Key takeaways:
- On July 8, 2026, the Department of Labor’s Inspector General announced a major investigation into H-1B and PERM visa fraud, working alongside a federal fraud task force.
- In its latest report to Congress, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) named staffing companies as a source of visa abuse, citing benching, worker reassignment, and fees charged to workers.
- You can review the same records an investigator would pull. Start with your Labor Condition Applications, Public Access Files, and actual wage records, and do it now.
Most enforcement headlines are noise for a staffing CEO. This one isn’t.
On July 8, the DOL Office of Inspector General (OIG) said it had opened a major investigation into fraud in the H-1B and PERM programs. It’s working with a federal fraud task force, and it’s asking workers who believe they were harmed, displaced, exploited, benched, or charged to get a job to come forward.
If your firm sponsors H-1B or PERM workers, or places people for clients who do, here’s what you need to know.
The OIG put staffing companies in writing
In a report to Congress, the OIG made a legislative recommendation asking for broader authority to police the H-1B program. Its reasoning called out our industry directly. “Some staffing companies utilize the H-1B program without having scheduled jobs already lined up,” the report says. It goes on to say that some employers “misrepresent their need for workers,” then reassign the extras to other companies or make foreign workers find their own placements. Others “illegally generated profits by requiring foreign workers to pay fees and recurring payments to secure H-1B visas.”
That’s a description of benching and pay-to-play, framed as fraud, in a document sitting on desks in Congress. When an Inspector General uses your sector as an example, you’re no longer a bystander in the enforcement conversation.
The report also points to an Illinois woman who pled guilty to immigration fraud for helping at least 148 foreign-national nurses obtain H-1B and EB-2 visas using falsified job documents. She took about $500 a nurse.
The days of flying under the radar are over
For the H-1B program, the DOL generally can’t investigate an employer at will. The Wage and Hour Division (WH) needs a complaint from an aggrieved worker, a credible tip, or a certification from the Secretary of Labor before it opens a case. For years, that meant quiet firms stayed quiet.
The OIG’s campaign changes the odds. It’s publicizing a national reporting channel and backing it with investigators and a fraud task force. Workers who’ve been exploited have every right to use it, and more of them will. The point isn’t to keep anyone quiet. It’s that you can no longer assume no one is looking, and the only durable protection is being able to prove you followed the rules.
What an investigator pulls first
None of what an auditor examines is secret. You can pull the same file today.
For H-1B placements, the fastest tell is your Public Access File. Federal rules require one for every H-1B worker, created within one working day of filing the Labor Condition Application (LCA) and kept for one year past that worker’s last day under the LCA. The DOL spells out the specifics in Fact Sheet #62F. The file has to hold the certified LCA, the wage rate, the prevailing wage source, a memo explaining how you set the actual wage, and proof you posted the position. Missing or thin files are the easiest violation to find and the hardest to explain.
From there, an investigator confirms the promises on the LCA are real, as the DOL describes in Fact Sheet #62U. That means checking the worker gets the wage you attested, in the occupation you named, at the location you listed. Benching a worker between assignments while underpaying or not paying is just the kind of failure the OIG flags. So is moving someone to a worksite that never appeared on the LCA.
What to fix before someone else finds it
Treat this quarter as your own audit window with four moves:
- Pull every active Public Access File and check it against the requirements in Fact Sheet #62F. If a file is missing the actual wage memo or the posting proof, rebuild it now, not after a subpoena.
- Reconcile pay to paperwork. Compare what each visa worker actually earns against the wage on the LCA. If there’s daylight, especially during bench time, that’s your highest dollar exposure. When it finds violations, the DOL can order back wages, assess civil money penalties, and bar a firm from the program for at least a year.
- Stop any fee arrangement that pushes program costs onto workers. Recurring payments to “keep” a visa are the specific abuse the OIG described. If a partner or downstream vendor does this, your name is still on the petition.
- Vet the firms you place through and staff for. If you feed a larger MSP or a client’s program as a subcontractor, their sloppiness becomes your investigation. Ask to see their compliance posture the way a buyer now asks to see your candidate verification process.
Compliance is quickly becoming an essential part of the potential client pitch. As buyers shift from paying for access to talent toward paying for assurance, a clean visa program is part of the product you sell.
Pull the file and check the wage. It’s better to find any issues yourself than have an investigator find them first.
